Final Fantasy VIII (1999) by Square

I'm a huge fan of the Final Fantasies of the SNES and PS1 era. I've put hundreds of hours into the western games of this era and I consider myself a qualified opinion on the quality of each.

I've replayed all of these in the past few years, and though dated, they all still represent a high-quality experience that's worth exploring even now, decades after the original releases. All of them, that is, except Final Fantasy VIII. The things that make these games so great; the quality of their writing and exploration of serious themes, the beautifully rendered (though aged) backgrounds, the excellent soundtracks, and the quality JRPG gameplay, are all noticeably lesser in Final Fantasy VIII than in its brethren.

An accurate depiction of what it's like to try and make sense of
Final Fantasy VIII's convoluted, lugubrious plot

VIII is plagued by a tedious, grind-heavy draw system that grates on the nerves from minute one and cannot be avoided in order to progress through the game. The junction system could have been, but its reliance on this tedious draw system to be effective kills whatever potential it has. From the second you're given control of your characters, you are expected to spend several hours out of the initial town, continuously drawing spells from enemies with which to junction to your stats. It's a mind-bogglingly bad design decision, and it's going to immediately kill the drive of most folks who are dipping into this game for historical purposes.

Another negative is puzzlingly awful plot writing. There are several instances of enormous plot-holes that smack of being rushed. Seifer attacks President Deling at the Broadcast Station in Timber, and is whisked away by the sorceress. Deling, presumably, escapes. Our heroes were also there, and were culpable, but are somehow allowed to walk straight out the front door. But why? And where are all of Deling's guards? It's established that he was very well-protected in Timber before this, so how can we just walk in and out of the broadcast area without being stopped, or anything? There are no fights in this section, no guards at all. And even more puzzling, almost all of this happens off-screen. There is also a moment later that I won't reveal because it's a massive spoiler, but basically: There's a large reveal, which is nearly impossible for none of the characters to have known about. This is explained away to us as the characters believing they all have shared memory loss. I'm not joking -- It's actually that bad.

There are many instances in the story that make no sense whatsoever. It feels like there are huge portions of the game's story that were ripped out, or unfinished. My uneducated assumption is that the team had little time to finish these segments and were rushed to complete the game to capitalize on the massive success that was Final Fantasy VII, but that's just my guess. Either way, these Final Fantasies live and die on their writing, and this is an aspect in which Final Fantasy VIII fails miserably.

Triple Triad, the card game present, is at first intriguing, but also plagued by the same sort of tedious, logistical nonsense that the junction and draw systems suffer from. Certain regions in the game have completely idiotic rulesets, and these are only changeable through a massive pain-in-the-ass of traveling to different regions and succumbing to whatever the RNG gods tell you.

The Steam port is also pretty awful. Controller support is a must with these games, as several minigames rely on on-screen button displays showing the original PlayStation symbols. This is something completely lost in translation with this Steam version, which stupidly uses S, X, C, and V in place of the controller's face buttons. These is extremely clunky, and it makes the train mission when you first arrive in Timber (when you have to input codes of numbers aligning to these face buttons) almost impossible. It's completely broken on Steam if you're using a controller -- Literally. The display is actually incorrect on the screen. I had to break out a pen and paper and write which buttons went with which, and after failing several times, switched to the keyboard to accomplish the mission instead. It's an absolute mess.

I've put several hundred hours into all of Square's recent rereleases from this era on Steam. I've got nearly 100 in Chrono Trigger, more than 100 in Final Fantasies VI, VII, and IX. And I've got nearly 150 in Final Fantasy X. If Square ever releases Steam ports for Final Fantasy Tactics and Xenogears, I'll probably put 100 into those, too.

It's noticeable, then, that Final Fantasy VIII has seen only 30 hours of play from me. And that's over two playthroughs. I replay the other games once every few years and still love them to this day; 20+ years after playing them for the first time. However, I haven't replayed Final Fantasy VIII since probably 1999 or 2000, and I've tried to replay it twice in the past few years since the Steam port released. I can never get much further than Galbadia Garden. Last time, it was the relentless amount of drawing I was subjecting myself to. "Why am I doing this? It isn't fun," I said to myself before putting the game down. That was a few years ago. This time it was traveling back and forth between Timber and Dollet and attempting to change the Random rule out of Triple Triad in Dollet. This was taking me hours, before I finally just put the game down once again and figured it was time to whip up this negative review.

The Final Fantasies released in the '90s and the early '00s are nearly universally phenomenal games. But every series has its duds, and for this series, it is unquestionably Final Fantasy VIII that falls far short by comparison to its brethren.

Oh, but Uematsu's soundtrack is good. Really good. It's by far the best part of the game. So, you know, just go check that out on YouTube or something. And skip this. Because Final Fantasy IX is probably the best game in the entire series. Do yourself a favor and just play that instead.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 34 hours

Final Fantasy VI (1994) by Square

I fondly remember the days of playing this game in my parents house as a 9-year old, awestruck by just how good video games can be. I played it for hours upon its release and it ignited a love for RPGs that lasts to this day. I still go back every once in a while to replay the game, and I'm happy to see that it's been ported to Steam so I don't have to break out the old Nintendo DS or -- gasp! -- my grandfatherly SNES that still sits in my closet next to a shoebox on my most cherished titles from the '90s.

Most reviewers gripe about the graphics "update", and while I generally do prefer the original sprites (sprites tend to age better than any polygonal graphics), I don't find the graphical change to be much worse. It's different, sure, but really not worse in any objective way. I can understand how the greybeards would be miffed at a change to their beloved classic games, but it really didn't bother me. And as a nearly day-one played of the original title in 1994, I'm about as old school as they come.

I absolutely adore Final Fantasy VII, but I did knock some points off for how bad the port from the PS1 to Steam was, and I'm happy to say that's not much of a problem here. This one, while it's not fantastic, seems to work fine. You're going to lack some high resolution options here, but given how badly they were implemented in Final Fantasy VII with its disastrously upscaled backgrounds, I'd say that's not too much of a problem. This isn't an HD remaster, it's just a port of the original game, which was designed for tube TVs rather than PC screens. As such, this is a perfect game to play windowed while you've got some other stuff going on in the background.

While the graphics have aged incredibly well, the story and writing, however, have not. When this game released it helped to push the bar of good character writing and narrative. Unfortunately that bar has long been pressed onward and well past where Final Fantasy VI left it. While the characters are still incredibly charming and thoughtfully written, and the plot has some decent surprises in store for you, the writing in general lacks a lot of the depth that we can find in modern day games.

That's no reason not to play Final Fantasy VI, though. The combat system is still fun, with a grand cast of party members each featuring their own special abilities carrying combat through the majority of the game. Using such a colorful cast of characters is a joy, and the game really takes pains to ensure that they're all unique and introduces them in a manner in which none of them are just a face in the crowd. You genuinely care about them all and want to see them succeed. You'll find yourself cheering when one of them lands a critical or pulls you out of a tough situation. The game isn't overly challenging unless you've got no idea what you're doing, though.

The Esper system is good, but lacks a little bit compared to the job system and the later Materia system, which is probably my favorite in the series outside of Final Fantasy Tactics' jobs and abilities system.

Seriously, Squeenix, can we get a PC port for Final Fantasy Tactics? Please?

It'd be a crime not to mention Nobuo Uematsu's unbelievably amazing score, which is among the best in the Final Fantasy series and certainly among the best scores in all of video game history. It's spellbinding, utterly engrossing. To this day I can't hear a track from it that doesn't take me back to sitting on my parents' carpet, staring up at the 20" tube TV, playing the best game I had ever played up to that point of my life; one that would stick with me more than 20 years later and inspire me to write a review about this newfangled Steam version. And that's why I love this game so much. It's a charming, emotionally impactful roller coaster ride to a simpler time.

Play it and maybe it'll be the same for you.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 108 hours

Final Fantasy VII (1997) by Square

Final Fantasy VII's extraordinary atmosphere will leave you reeling

I grew up as a young child in the '80s playing the first Final Fantasy on the NES with my father. I was too young to read, so he had to read the dialogue to me as we played. As I grew and learned to read myself, I spent hour upon hour with the sequels, Final Fantasy II (IV in Japan), and III (VI in Japan), both for the SNES. I have a strong memory involving the time I walked several miles to my friend's house after school because he had a new PlayStation, and a copy of Final Fantasy VII, a game that I was hugely excited to experience given my history with the series. I had spent the past few months reading about the game in various video game publications and was hyped out of my mind to try it.

It was autumn, 1997, and I was 12 years old at the time. 15 years ago. I've replayed the game a dozen times since then, and mostly recently delved back into the Steam port to examine how the game has aged and how well the port runs.

The very first thing that I noticed about the game was the chasm between how well the audio design and soundtrack have aged versus how poorly the graphics have. It becomes clearly apparent that sprites have aged far better than polygonal characters when comparing this game to an older, sprite-based games in the series such as Final Fantasy VI. Sprites carried a certain charm to them, and remain tolerable despite their lack of beauty. Polygons, for lack of a better description, just look strange and ugly. Their blockiness represents a human character far more poorly than even a sprite can. To compare it to Hollywood, sprites are like Disney cartoon of the '70s, while polygons are like the bad special effects of the '80s. The audio, however, has aged gracefully. Nobuo Uematsu's haunting, elegiac score (see above video) has always been perfect for the game, and I remembered how fond I was of it the first time around immediately upon starting the game again.

The characters are generally well-realized, if not helped by some shoddy translation. Cloud is such a deep and human character that it's worth playing through the game just to witness his growth. By the end of the game you come to realize how deeply flawed a person he is, and having such a flawed hero leading the game was something that was quite groundbreaking for JRPGs at the time. Sephiroth's villainy hasn't shown age, either. He's still one of the best gaming villains in history, a title well earned through his enigmatic actions and intriguing backstory. Some of the characters lean more heavily towards comic relief, like Cait Sith, but are still given the depth they deserve in a game as large as this one. Each character's backstory is engaging. I will always fondly remember being shocked at how much depth was given to Red XIII, a character you meet in a lab early in the game who seems at first to be nothing more than a cool-looking, speaking attack feline. Cosmo Canyon looks amazing, the background music is fantastic (see indented video), and the story it tells about Red XIII will hook your emotions immediately.

It's obvious what to expect from the gameplay. This game is purely old school JRPG. It doesn't bother me, as it's a type of game that I once had a huge affinity for. I can jump back into the more slowly-paced, active turn-based battle systems any time and still enjoy it. To others, it may be a bit more tedious. This is especially true regarding random battles. The tedium of random battles may be intolerable for others that are more used to the real-time fare of old cRPGs or more recent Western RPGs. It's difficult for me to be objective enough to say. I don't mind random battles even now, but I never have.

One thing I will tout is the materia system. I've always loved it. It's my favorite form of character development in any Final Fantasy game, and it holds up. Growing your materia through the management of your weapons is so much fun, and the high-level materia such as Slash-All and Double Cut really make you feel all-powerful toward the end portion of the game. They're scaled very well.

The main complaint from my latest replay is an issue that never seemed to bother me before. The control of Cloud through the various pre-rendered areas is absolutely atrocious. Pressing up on the directional pad will sometimes cause him to go left or right, and pressing right or left on the pad will sometimes cause him to go down. There's no clear indication of when this will happen -- It's unique to each area. This becomes particularly annoying in areas where random battles occur. Very often I'd find myself doubling back due to this, and fighting far more random battles than I actually had to.

I wouldn't be able to conclude this without mentioning the cutscenes and minigames. The idea of rewarding players with a CGI cutscene during certain parts of the game was a fresh, new concept at the time of the game's release. Seeing the devs at Square flaunt their graphical prowess was mind-blowing, and the cutscenes were unlike anything in video games at the time. They truly were rewarding, and I remember being so impressed as a 12-year old first playing this game that I recorded them on a VHS tape for later playback. The minigames were also groundbreaking, but have aged poorly. Bad control plagues many of them, specifically the motorcycle and snowboarding games. But the inclusion of these changed the genre for years; the lack of minigames in a post-Final Fantasy VII JRPG would be a strange omission for a later title.

Final Fantasy VII has got its problems. In some cases, it's aged beautifully and become the historically powerful title that gamers expected it to be upon its release. Final Fantasy VII brought RPGs as a genre into the mainstream. The graphics and control, however, will be nearly unbearable to any gamer going back in time to play this game for the first time.

I do have some complaints specifically regarding this Steam port. Every resolution that isn't 640x480 windowed looks terrible. They've upped the resolution on the characters and NPCs, but the pre-rendered backgrounds are the same so they look awful in any other resolution. And don't even think about going to 16:9. All it does is stretch the picture to fit the screen.

There's also a persistent black bar (pictured above) along the bottom of the screen that is only ever filled in when accessing the menu. Imagine you're watching a film in letterbox, except that there's only one black bar on the bottom of the screen and no matching bar on the top. Just awful.

On top of the graphical issues, Square's ridiculous DRM is present. You must log into Square Enix when you first start the game. People already hate Uplay. Why would Square do this? It's an idiotic move.

People have also mentioned the music quality being subpar compared to the PS1 version, but it honestly didn't affect my experience at all. I definitely noticed the music being a bit different, it didn't seem any worse than the original game.

Despite the wear of aging and the shoddy port, I still believe this game is a must-play for anyone who liked the original or any gamer looking for a history lesson. There is still enough depth in the characters, immersion in the environments despite their age due to a phenomenal soundtrack and great art design, and player investment in the story. Like an old painting, Final Fantasy VII continues to be historically relevant and is worth seeing and experiencing if only to recognize the influence it had on present day gaming. The paint has aged, and the artwork is unfortunately not quite as vibrant and stunning as it once was, but with the right mindset you can still experience it and be moved.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐